Linux Blog

I was going to write an article on how to open docx’s and other Office 2007 documents but there are numerousarticlesoutthere explaining how to do this on many distributions. They all basically say the same thing, you download the file, extract it and put it in your open office directory. Normally there are a couple of files but the on we are interested in is the main binary. What some people don’t know is that if you want to just quickly open or convert a document you can do so by using the odfconverter binary. (Read on …)

Hello everybody it is I Kaleb from over at http://kpstuff.servebeer.com again come to talk today about an app that I have been using for a while but just recently decided to make it fix my dependence of the system tray all together.

If you read my blog regularly you would know that I am not a fan of GUI applications, I use as few of them as possible. I prefer to use command line programs instead for many reasons: one they are faster, two they are easier and quicker to use/access the features that I want from them, and three I just like the way they look.

For a long time I have used the Fluxbox window manager because it is small lightweight and over all pretty. But no matter what window manager I use: Gnome, KDE, Xfce, FluxBox or OpenBox I have always had some dependence on the system tray, which annoyed me a lot.

Some of them things that I liked a system tray for were a static clock that was always in the same spot and I could always look down and see it, also it had a few nice little icons over there for me to use at my will, like for instance, Gmail-Notify which is a little systray applet that will tell you if you have gmail or not and give you a little pop-up if you get new mail. Also this was for a while how i was telling if I had a new message in pidgin.

Then I started thinking to myself,

“All of these things could be done with Conky and I could use Conky for even more.”

So began the transformation.

If you don’t know already what Conky is, it is a little application that will put text in any format and of almost any type of data you want, weather it be the weather report for the day or the week, or your battery status, the day of the week, or your wireless link quality. It blends into your desktop very well and will give you that sweet geekish look that everybody looks for in a desktop.

First we need to install it.

Gentoo:

emerge -av conky

Make sure that you check out the use flags in Gentoo for things like “wifi” and others

Arch Linux:

pacman -S conky

Ubuntu:

apt-get install conky

Now that you have Conky installed it is time for you to figure out where on your screen you want to put it and also how you want it to look. I wont get into to much detail about how to set it up because those things can be figured out by the most green of Linux users. Also there should be an example config file for Conky that came with the install for Gentoo it is /etc/conky/conky.conf. You need to copy this file to ~/.conkyrc and then edit it at your leisure.

It is quite simple to figure out first you decided the main variables for the program then after the word TEXT you decide how your Conky will look on your desktop. What “text” you would like to see and in what fashion. It is here where you will replace your systray.The first thing I wanted my replacement system tray to display was my gmail messages, weather I had emails or not and how many. So I put together a little script that you can obtain from http://kpstuff.servebeer.com/~admin/check_gmail.sh in order to use this script you need to download it. I suggest to put it into a folder such as ~/scripts/ also make it executable with either “chmod 755 check_gmail.sh” or “chmod +x check_gmail.sh” and remember to edit check_gmail.sh for your username and password. Then you need to edit your ~/.conkyrc file under the TEXT area to resemble this

${texeci 60 ~/scripts/check_gmail.sh}

After this I wanted a clock obviously. Now the time variable has almost a million different options for the format that it gives so I will give you an example of how to set it up but you should run “man strftime” to see a full list of formatting options.

${time %I:%M%p}

This will put a time format on your Conky that resembles “02:19PM”

Yes that is right it is that easy and you can almost print anything you want on Conky even RSS feeds, I suggest you try it out at least once, but not just a little install it and run it and it doesn’t work try.

There are literally hundreds of variables that can be used in Conky and those that are not variables can be created using shell/perl/php/and ruby scripts.

For a list of variables go to http://conky.sourceforge.net/config_settings.html and http://conky.sourceforge.net/variables.html

Thank you once more for your time and remember to leave comments for any of the writers for the Linux blog because each of us would sure appreciate feedback on our writings, whether it be good or bad.